Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  Doc and I saw a side of the Martian frontier that most people on Earth didn’t even know existed: hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or malfunctioning equipment, psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our sorrows in homemade brew. There’s many wonderful things about Mars, but it’s not Earth or even the Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it doesn’t kill outright, it conspires to drive insane.

  Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what we missed about Christmas.

  It was the third week of Aries, m.y. 53. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the taprooms were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just returned from delivering medical supplies to the poor schmucks at Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some discarded fiberoptics over the bar.

  “I miss mistletoe,” I murmured. I was working on my second beer by then, so I wasn’t conscious of my alliteration. “Mistletoe and Christmas trees.”

  “You don’t know mistletoe and Christmas trees,” Doc said.

  “Sure do. Had them in my family’s apartment. My mother and father, they used to kiss beneath the…”

  “You grew up on the Moon. You had vinyl mistletoe and plastic Christmas trees. Bet you’ve never smelled the real thing.”

  “No, but it was close enough.”

  “Not in the slightest. You’d know the difference.” Doc sipped his beer. “But I get the point. Out in the belt, we’d get together in the wardroom on Christmas Eve and sing carols. You know caroling…?”

  “Sure. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘The First Day of Christmas,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock’…”

  “‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town,’ that’s my favorite. And then we’d exchange gifts. Sarah gave me a ring with a little piece of gold from an asteroid ore our ship had refined.” He smiled at the memory. “Marriage didn’t last, but I held onto the ring.”

  “My favorite was a little rocket from my Dad. I was eight…nine, I guess. He made it for me in his lab. About two meters long, with a hollow nose cone. We put a little note with our squid number in the cone, then went EVA and hiked up to the crater rim, set the trajectory, fueled it up and fired it at Earth.” Once again, I remembered that little rocket’s silent launch, and how it lanced straight up into the black sky over Tycho. “Dad told me that it would eventually get there and land somewhere, and maybe someone would find it and send back a letter.”

  “Anyone ever fax you?”

  “Naw. It probably never got to Earth…or if it did, it probably burned up on entry.” I shrugged. “But I like to think that it made the trip, and just landed some place where no one ever found it.”

  “But it meant something, didn’t it? Like Sarah’s ring. No Christmas gift is ever insignificant. There’s always a little of your soul in whatever you give someone.” Doc scowled at the lights being strung above the bar. “Here, it’s just an excuse for people to get drunk and stupid, and the next day everyone has to apologize to each other. Sorry for banging on your door. Sorry for keeping you awake last night. Sorry for making a pass at your wife…”

  “What do you expect? Rudolph the green-nosed reindeer?”

  “Red. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Don’t they teach you selenians anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. Red-nosed reindeer.” I polished off my second and last, shoved the mug across the bar. “Yeah, I know, but all that Santa stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense out here, y’know?”

  “It doesn’t? Why shouldn’t it?”

  I could tell that he was spoiling for fight. “Aw, c’mon, Doc…does this look like Earth to you? Cheststuff smoking on an open fire, jackass stepping on your toes…”

  “You can’t even get the lyrics right! ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes…’”

  “What’s a chestnut?”

  “Never mind.” He turned away from me. “Jeff, I’ll have another one. Put it on his tab.”

  I didn’t object. Doc was in a self-righteous mood; when he was this way, silence was the only way you could deal with him. I helped myself to some fried algae from the bowl the bartender had placed between us while I waited for him to calm down.

  “I guess what I miss the most,” he finally said, “is the look…no, not just the look, the glow…children have on Christmas morning. Until I came here, I’d never seen a kid who didn’t think it was the best day of the year. Even out in the belt, it was something they could look forward to. But here…”

  “I know what you mean.” My gaze wandered to the line of ceramic liquor bottles lined up on the shelf. “The best some of them can hope for is that their folks won’t be too hung over to make breakfast for them. I mean, some people try to do better, but…I dunno, something’s missing.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s missing” Doc tapped his finger against the bar top. “It isn’t just trees or presents. Magic, that’s missing. There’s no Sinterklass”

  “Yeah. No Santa Claus.”

  “Did I say Santa Claus? I didn’t say Santa Claus. I said Sinterklass.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to brain me with his beer mug. “Hell, yes, there’s a difference! Sinterklass arrives in Holland on a ship from Spain. He’s a tall, slender gent with a long white beard who wears a red robe and bishop’s minter. He rides into town on a white horse with his assistant Zwarte Piet, where he gives presents to all the good children on his list. Then he…what’s so damn funny?”

  “That’s Santa Claus, you quack! Only the details are different! Reindeer, elves, a sleigh from the North Pole…it’s still the same mook, right down to the extortion racket.”

  “True, but Sinterklass came first…or St. Nicholas, if we want to call him by his proper name.” He swigged his beer. “He was brought to America by the Dutch, but just like everything else brought over from Europe, he was changed until virtually no one remembered his origins.”

  “Tell me about it. Same thing happened to my African ancestors…although not by choice.”

  “Then you’d appreciate the similarity between Santa’s elves and Zwarte Piet. It means Black Peter…he’s a Moor.”

  I shrugged. “Sounds like a demotion. My great-grandfather used to play Santa every Christmas at a shopping mall. There weren’t many black Santas back then, I’m told.”

  “Your grandfather played Santa Claus?” He raised an eyebrow. “Now there’s a coincidence. My father played Sinterklass in our village, as did my grandfather.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Goes with the genes.” He stroked his trim white beard. “Men in my family have the right whiskers for the job. All we have to do is let our beards grow out and…”

  He stopped just then. To this day, I’ll never forget his slack-jawed expression as he stared at me in wonderment. He had just spoken of the glow that children have on Christmas morning; in that instant, I saw something like that appear in his own face. Wonder and joy, wonder and joy; tidings of wonder and joy…I don’t believe in telepathy any more than I do in Santa Claus, yet I suddenly knew exactly what he was thinking.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, turning to hop off the stool and book out of there. “Don’t even think for a minute…”

  “Oh, shut up and sit down.” Doc grabbed my wrist before I could make it to the door. “Let’s see if we can work this out.”

  Against my better judgment, I stayed. Doc finished his beer, and then we switched to coffee, and by the end of the evening I had a new name.

  Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet live in the caldera of Olympus Mons, within an invisible buckydome which contains their secret toyshop. When they’re not making toys or teaching sandbugs to perform tricks for their flea circus, they watch all the boys and girls of Mars through magic telescopes that can peer through walls, putting a long list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

&n
bsp; Then, on the first sol of Christmas Week, they load their gifts aboard their airship, climb aboard, and fly away from Olympus Mons. Over the next seven sols they visit the colonies one by one, stopping at each to distribute presents to the good children of Mars. They may stay overnight at a settlement, because sometimes Black Peter gets too tired to fly St. Nicholas to the next colony, but if they do stay the children should try to leave the pair alone, or next Christmas they may find the boots of their skinsuits filled with sand instead of candy.

  That’s the story that we artfully disseminated through the Marsnet. It was posted on all the usual sites kids would mouse, plus a few that their parents would find. It isn’t hard to create a myth, if know what you’re doing, but Doc and I didn’t do it all by ourselves, and not without running into a little trouble.

  Arsia Station’s board of selectmen were skeptical when we formerly pitched the idea to them at the next weekly meeting. They thought Doc and I had dreamed this up as a sneaky way of earning overtime until Doc explained that we would also be transporting food, medical supplies, and replacement parts to the settlements. Not only that, but since we would be hitting each settlement in turn, we could take stuff from one place to another, in much the same way supply caravans presently operated, yet in a shorter time-span and for more charitable reasons. The selectmen were all too aware of the ill-will some of the smaller settlements felt toward Arsia; our plan would make for good colonial relationships. So they found a few extra megalox in the budget to fund an extended medical sortie, not the least of which was subcontracting Miss Thuvia from AeroMars for a seven-sol sortie.

  When we contacted the other five colonies and informed them of our proposal, we received mixed reactions. Wellstown, Sagan, Viking, and New Chattanooga were mystified by the notion of a Martian Santa, but otherwise interested, albeit not wildly enthusiastic; if anything, it meant they would he receiving a previously unscheduled visit from Arsia General, and a few freebies to boot. West Bank was initially cool to the idea—they didn’t observe Christmas Week, after all—until we agreed to knock off the Sinterklass routine and perform as if it was just another airlift. But DaVinci was the aresian home of Ebenezer Scrooge; after a few days of stone silence, we received a terse fax from its Proletariat, stating that the free people of DaVinci had decided to reject St. Nicholas as an archaic symbol of capitalistic society and Black Peter as a shameful holdover of racist imperialism. Well, tough boots: no candy for the commies.

  Most people went for it, though, and once word leaked out about what Doc and I intended to do, we received assistance from various individuals, sometimes without us soliciting them for help. Aresians have a strong tradition of looking out for the other guy, after all, and the citizens of Arsia Station came out for us. A textile shop volunteered to make toys for us: tiny Mars landers, statuettes of men in skinsuits, some inflatable replicas of Miss Thuvia. A food-processing firm turned out several kilos of hard candy; it looked weird and tasted the same, or at least so I thought, but Doc field-tested samples on kids passing through the ER ward and none of them spit it out. A lady I was dating from Data One hacked out a game pak which she stored on a handful of spare disks; one of them was a little hide-and-seek involving Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet chasing each other through a three-dimensional maze. She made sure that the odds of Black Peter winning the match were always in my character’s favor, something which Doc resented when he tried playing it.

  Yet the best efforts were those on behalf of our skinsuits. It wouldn’t do for us to cycle through airlocks looking like any other dust-caked aresian coming in from the cold. Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet were magical, after all; we had to look the part. So we hired Uncle Sal, Arsia’s premier skinsuit tailor, to come up with some hempcloth overgarments which closely mimicked the traditional costumes worn in the Netherlands. Doc’s outfit was bright red and white, with a long scarlet cape whose ribbed hood, when pulled over his helmet, looked much like a bishop’s minter. My costume was dark blue, with a plumed white collar around the neck and puffed-out sleeves and leggings. To add to the effect, Sal wove colored microfilaments through the garments; when we switched them on, we looked like walking Christmas trees.

  The only problem we had was with Doc’s beard. He stopped trimming it once our plan was approved, and within a couple of weeks it flowed down his face like a pale waterfall. It looked terrific and his girlfriends loved running their fingers through it, but he had the damnedest time tucking it into his helmet. He finally figured out what that hearty “ho-ho-ho” business was all about; it allowed him to spit out the whiskers in his mouth.

  Altogether, it was an impressive effort, doubly so by the fact that we pulled it all together in less than three weeks. On Ta.6, m.y. 53, Doc and I climbed aboard Miss Thuvia and set sail from Arsia Station. The blimp had been temporarily festooned with multicolored lights; I turned them on as soon as we were clear of the hangar, and watched from the gondola windows as a small crowd of aresians waved us farewell.

  It was a good beginning, but our first stop, at twilight on the first day of the tour, was a bust. West Bank didn’t want anything to do with Christmas, so I kept the lights turned off when we approached the settlement on the western slope of the Tharsis volcano range, and we weren’t wearing our outfits when we exited the blimp’s airlock. The settlers were cordial enough; we handed out sweets and toys to the handful of kids we met inside, and once their folks unloaded the supplies they had requested—which wasn’t much, because West Bank took pride in its self-sufficiency—we had a meal and a glass of wine in the commissary before we were shown the way to the hostel. Nothing lost, but nothing really gained either, save for fuel and a night’s rest; by dawn the next morning we were airborne again. The only thing which made the trip worthwhile was seeing the sunrise over Pavonis Mons as we flew eastward toward the upper edge of the Noctis Labyrinthis.

  That was the longest leg of the journey. Over a thousand klicks lay between West Bank and Wellstown, and although Doc stood watch in the cockpit while I bunked out for a couple of hours, I did little more than doze. Questions ran through my mind even while my eyes were shut, murmuring like the incessant drone of Miss Thuvia’s props. What were we doing, two grown men dressing up like the Dutch Santa and his Moorish apprentice? I could be home now, trying to find an unattached lady with whom I could share some holiday cheer. What were we trying to achieve here? The children at West Bank had shown only slight interest in us; a little girl had stoically gazed at the toy lander Doc placed in her hand, and a small boy had made a sour face when he ate the candy I had given him. Yeah, so maybe Christmas wasn’t part of their culture, but the Jewish friends with whom I was raised on the Moon knew what it was, if only for the spirit of the season. Perhaps Christmas didn’t belong on Mars. So why did any of this matter?

  When I finally got up and went forward, I could see that Doc had been contemplating the same thought. “It’ll go better in Wellstown,” he said softly, but I don’t think he believed it either.

  We ate cold rations as the sun went down behind us, drank some more powdered coffee, and said very little to one another until the lights of Wellstown appeared before us, a tiny cluster of white and amber lights against the cold darkness of the Martian night. Almost reluctantly, we pulled on our skinsuits; I almost forgot to switch Miss Thuvia’s Christmas lights until we were above the landing field.

  A handful of men grabbed our mooring lines, dragged us in, tied us down. It was only the second time we had worn our costumes on EVA; Doc stepped on his cape and nearly fell down the gangway, and the puffed-out legging of my suit forced me into a bow-legged gait. We looked stupid as we made our way to the airlock of the nearest buckydome; the final touch came when Doc couldn’t fit inside, and he had to lower the peaked hood of his cape.

  The outer hatch shut behind us; we got a chance to study each other as the airlock cycled. Two fools in gaudy, luminescent skinsuits. A bad dream come to life. We had been flying for the past twelve hours, but I would have gladly flown
straight home if I thought it would save me any further humiliation. Why did I ever let Doc talk me into…?

  Then the green light flashed above the inner hatch. Doc and I were unclasping our helmets when the lockwheel began turning its own. Then the inner hatch was thrown open from outside. Bright light rushed into the airlock, and along with it, the excited squeals of the dozens of children waiting outside.

  At that instant, it all made perfect sense.

  Even after all these years, I still consider that first Christmas tour to be our best. We ran short of candy and toys before we were through, and we were bone-tired by the time we left Sagan for the last leg of the circuit back to Arsia Station, yet we brought home with us the most exciting discovery since microfossils were found in the Noctis Labyrinthis.